I develop and maintain a number of add-ons and utilities for various widget (mainly aMember) which generally means I need to install php based codes onto other people's systems. Whilst I have a VPS and have access to rsync and all sorts of yummy tools most of the people I deal with have a basic ftp access and that's all folks. To upload from my local system is also a problem as I am satellite based (two-way) so it is fairly slow and expensive and in any case the files are already on my server.

So there is no rsync, fxp, ssh and I can't really install anything as it is obviously not my system, they would be justifiably miffed if I started installing file managers or other things onto their sites.

What I have been trying to find is a utility that I can run on my server from the web, preferably php based, that will be like a file manager but a bit different.

Two panels.
LH-Side the local server .. pretty much like a standard FM application
RH-Side ability to login via FTP to the clients system

Then I can fiddle as required.

The closest thing I have found is net2ftp but it doesn't have the gui interface, at the moment I simply ssh into my server power up ncftp and run that way, but something easier to use would be mucho niceness.

I've heard of a lot of web-based file managers, but I'm not sure you'll find any that support connecting to other servers. Maybe you'd be better off writing a few scripts that copy the files you need?
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Michael MiorJun 15 '10 at 3:27

2 Answers
2

If you're fine installing GUI apps on your server, why not just run gftp or something similar? You can easily create a shortcut to ssh -X local_server gftp to launch it. This seems like much less of a hassle.

I think you should look at long-term solution. Instead of manually distributing the code. Why not automate this process. For example, at work, we host multiple websites for registrars all using Drupal. We used to manually distribute updates to websites but then we automated all application installs. We use puppet (a ruby framework). We write recipes on the server (that would be on your side). We install puppet client on the client side, i.e. where websites are hosted. We update files (i.e. php code) on the puppet server side. Start the puppet client, it connects to the server downloads compiled catalog (this is the recipe compiled with php files etc etc), install php code and reload web server and we are done. The update process takes seconds. The connection b/w puppet client and server is encrypted.

We have puppet recipes for almost everything... wiki, websites, ldap, kereberos, svn etc etc. Give it a shot.